So now a new group has appeared claiming to eschew all political labels. Appropriately, they have taken the moniker “No Labels.” A closer examination of this group, however, seems to indicate that this is about as artificial as artificial can get.

The “No Labels” approach is inherently contradictory. Simply by creating the group and giving it a name, it has been labeled. Now we have Republicans, Democrats, and No Labelers. While it claims to be inclusive, it seems to attract primarily those to the left of center, whether Democrats or Republicans. The thing is, they don’t consider themselves left of center; rather, they place themselves squarely at the center and conclude that anyone not of their ilk is a “wingnut.” In fact, one of this group’s founders, John Avlon, wrote a book using that term.

I think it’s also instructive that this movement, such as it is, arose only after Republicans took back the House, made gains in the Senate, swamped governorships, and dominated state legislatures in the November elections. Why all of a sudden the need for a centrist party? Obviously because the Republicans did so well—and they must be stopped.

This effort is probably not going to make much of a dent in American politics. The idea that there are no “sides” in political debate is fanciful. Even the Founding Fathers had to face up to that. The Constitution, as originally written, did not take into account the development of political parties. There was this high hope that statesmen would govern for the good of all. Yet during Washington’s administration, we divided into Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans.

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When they teach American government and the history of the early American republic, political scientists and historians have a puzzle to explain. There is, within the American constitution, no mention of political parties. And yet it is impossible to make sense of American politics in and after the early republic without reference to parties. Moreover, the parties that did emerge in the United States bear only a faint resemblance to the parties that existed in England and on the European continent prior to the American civil war and even less to the parties that exist on the other side of the Atlantic today.

The two puzzles are related. It is true that the Framers of the Constitution had no liking and made no provision for organized political parties, and it is also true that all of the early Presidents made at least a half-hearted attempt to transcend partisanship. It was not until Andrew Jackson that we got our first unequivocally partisan President. It is also true that the partisan divide that emerged in the 1790s was viewed by both sides as something temporary and regrettable. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed a party, which in time they called the Republican Party, to counter what they considered a conspiracy on the part of George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and in response he formed a party to counter what he considered a conspiracy on their part. Absent the conspiracy, or in the eventuality of its defeat and disappearance, the American republic’s first partisans expected the parties to wither away.

In this presumption, as Martin van Buren came to realize, they were wrong. Given the separation of powers, it was virtually impossible to govern in the absence of partisan alliances. But the very structure of American government – in which Congressmen are elected by particular constituencies located in particular places and look to that locality for re-election, and in which Senators represent particular states and are no less sensitive to local concerns – subverts partisanship and promotes a species of moderation as well. Only the President sees the Union from the perspective of the whole. When Tip O’Neill remarked that all politics is local, he spoke in a fashion perfectly appropriate to his situation as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We must, then, view political parties from a double perspective.

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Before the most recent report on Lehman Brothers’ use of Enron-like methods to hide debt from its balance sheet, Greece had recently been accused of similar shenangians.  The sovereign was under scrutiny for swaps it had set up with Goldman Sachs that allowed the nation to mask its real debt load, effectively cooking its books in order to meet the fiscal standards required for admittance into the Eurozone in 2001.  This was not the first time this type of deceptive transaction had been consummated.

The joyfully iconoclastic financial blog Zero Hedge had uncovered a little-known 2001 report by a little-known Italian Economist named Gustavo Piga which showed that Italy had used almost the exact same transactions as those used by the Greeks to mask their finances and gain entrance to the Eurozone in 1997.  For his courageous exposé, most disturbingly Piga’s life was threatened.  Why was this the case?

Piga had been the first to find “…a real-world example of how sovereign borrowers can use derivatives to window-dress public accounts as a means of achieving short-term political goals.”  As the Council on Foreign Relations which collaborated with Piga on the report noted, Italy was able to do this by “taking a cash advance in 1997 against an expected foreign exchange profit in 1998.  Under accounting rules, this is simply impermissible.  Borrowers cannot use loans to anticipate capital gains on a bond.”  The transactions allowed Italy to artifically reduce their deficit in 1997 by increasing their deficit in 1998.

And according to the CFR, what was the significance of this Enron-like Italian book-cooking?

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Republicans should welcome a comparison of their party’s history with that of the Democrats – the party of slavery and socialism, Big Government and the Ku Klux Klan.

As Republicans try to repel the socialist onslaught, the way to win – and to deserve to win – is to embrace our party’s original reform agenda.   The patriots who created our Grand Old Party did so in order to preserve the vision of the Founding Fathers.   And the way they did it has valuable lessons for us today.

Let’s first look at the party currently in power.   Democrat ties to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson are negligible.   In fact, the Democratic Party was established in 1832 at a national convention organized by Cabinet secretaries and other prominent supporters of the Andrew Jackson administration.   From the start, the Democratic Party was a top-down organization.   Submission to the grand leader and astroturfing – that is, fake grassroots activity – for the Democrats it’s the same old same old.

In contrast, the Republican Party began as a truly grassroots movement very similar to the Tea Parties now sweeping the nation.   Ordinary people doing extraordinary things – that’s what created the GOP.   For example, at the famous meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin that named the party “Republican” there were no politicians at all, just fifty-three men and women who took a stand.  The first Republican state convention, in Jackson, Michigan, was attended by thousands of farmers and laborers and small businessmen.   From the grassroots upward, that’s the Republican Party at its best.

The Republican Party was born as a civil rights movement.

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No, not his problem with the GOP. In an interesting piece at RealClearPolitics, Jay Cost argues that the Obama Presidency seems at odds with our republican form of government. We’re perhaps not quite at a ‘cult of personality’ stage, but we are probably as close as we’ve ever come:

Ultimately, this President stands a better chance of success if he embraces the republican character of the people who imbue his temporary position with its power and majesty. The fact is that we are a republican people who tend not to think that anybody is better than we. If we begin to intuit that the President thinks he is better, it could impede his efforts to rally us to his side.

It is also a fact that staunch republicans created the presidency, and the office reflects their preferences even after 220 years of intervening history. By explicit design, the President is not a leader-for-life. Instead, he must face the judgment of his peers just 48 months after he wins the office. The Constitution endorses the view of the supremacy of the people because it delineates a timeline for when the executive power leaves the President and returns to the people (originally, as represented by the state governments). As if that were not enough, the 22nd Amendment forbids a President from seeking a third term, meaning that the people of this democratic republic will be around long after the Obama Administration has come to an end.

Read the whole thing here.